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acrussel

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About acrussel

  • Birthday 06/20/1988

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  • Favorite Games
    Geneforge 4, Avernum I & II, Icewind Dale I & II, Baldur's Gate II, Phantasy Star II

acrussel's Achievements

Fledgling Fyora

Fledgling Fyora (1/17)

  1. I heartily endorse keeping health low. High health does not make combat harder, it just makes it more tedious. A few additional suggestions: 1. I really don't like that the Sorcerer status effect spells are centered on the caster. Sorcerers are squishy and should stay away from combat. As is, status effect spells, in order to be maximally effective, require the Sorcerer to charge into battle, where they can cast their spell and then get slaughtered. As a result, I tended to ignore the Sorcerer's status spells, which makes me sad because I love status spells. Also, as it is now, I can't see which enemies will be affected by say status effect spells, because as soon as I select it the Sorcerer casts it. 2. Please for the love of all that is holy have a special boss autosave that saves between the end of the pre-combat dialogue and the beginning of boss fight itself. I have no problem with challenging boss fight encounters. I have a serious problem with having to slog through the same dialogue half a dozen times because the boss keeps kicking my butt. Not only does it waste my time, but it also seriously erodes any impact that the dialogue may have on me. I think allowing me to try a boss fight again without going through the pre-combat dialogue over and over again would enhance my enjoyment of the game more than anything else.
  2. Considering how many times I've died over the course of the games, that's probably the most likely outcome. That is a good point, and you're right it does make for a good story. Guess I just like having all my protagonists interwoven somehow. Allows me to imagine two over-arching stories: the myriad consequences the Geneforge and canisters have on the Shaper Empire, and their impact on a particular group of people (in my case, a family). Allows for both a broad, sweeping, epic story and a very focused, very personal story. Also, slightly off-topic, but that whole nobody to unstoppable force thing that runs through most RPGS has always bothered me a little, especially when you consider the timeframe that most games occur in (usually months. Very occasionally a few years). Going from barely able to fight off overgrown rats to slaughtering dragons in less than a year is kind of like going from struggling to write a program that prints "Hello World" to the screen, to solving P=NP in said year. I think it'd be kind of interesting to see an RPG that focuses on a single character(or group of characters), but has various timeskips between chapters, so that the entire game spans say twenty or thirty years. Then, storywise you could justify the character's massive growth in power as being a gradual thing that's happened over decades. Of course, in terms of gameplay you'd probably actually have spurts of power growth that correspond to each chapter, followed by long years of stagnation which are the years that pass between chapters. But that could easily be filed under Gameplay-Story segregation. I think the only games I've seen that do anything like that are Might and Magic 1, and the early Wizardry games. In Might and Magic 1, your characters age a year every time they level up. In Wizardry your characters age every time you stay at the Inn to heal.
  3. Ooh, I really like the Monarch touch. One of the things I don't like about my background is that my GF1 protagonist, despite having such a massive role in the development of my GF3,4,5 protagonists is never directly heard from after GF1. It would be kind of nice if I could somehow get one of my protagonists to face her, because otherwise it feels like a dangling plot thread. I might have to consider some retconning ... or see if I can find an Agent boss who I could justify as being my GF1 protagonist. Maybe the bunker Agent? (I forget her name. She's one of the three Shapers that holds the line between the Shapers and northern Rebels in GF4). That is a nice reason for why neither Alwan nor Greta want to speak of the GF protagonist. For me, Alwan's reasons are obvious, but Greta's reasons are more that she gets freaked out by just how much my GF3 protagonist changes (and not for the better) as a result of the canisters. My big question is, what happened to your GF3 protagonist that keeps him from leading the Trakovites during GF4/GF5? By the end of GF3, he was just as powerful as Litalia, and it seemed to me that Litalia (for all her questionable methods) did a lot to improve the clout of the Trakovites, so you'd figure that the GF3 protagonist would have a similar effect. Talk about the butterfly effect. A small bit of mercy by your GF4 protagonist ends up having a massive impact on how the war ends. I like it.
  4. Hello everyone, I recently beat all 5 Geneforge games, and one thing I really like about the Geneforge (and Avernum) games is how conducive they are to crafting complex backstories for your characters. The fact that your characters are basically blank slates give you a lot flexibility, while the rich gameworld gives you a lot of ideas to draw on. So I was curious, what are the backstories for your characters in the various Geneforge games? Do they all tie together, or are they all separate? Do you imagine any of them making appearances as NPCs in later games ala Greta and Alwan, or do they just disappear into the ether? For example, here are the rough backgrounds of my own characters. The games follow the endings that line up the closest to canon. All my characters are Agents/Infiltrators because I'm a magic-junkie. GF1 : A fairly generic Agent-in-training. The only thing special about her is that her home village suffered for a few weeks from attacks by a rogue Shaper with delusions of grandeur, before being killed by a couple of Agents. This experience with the abuse of Shaping prompts her to react with more than a little horror to what she sees on Sucia Island, and leads to an Unaligned/Obeyer ending. Naturally, she's a canister junkie by the end, since it's the only way an Agent could hope to survive on Sucia Island. GF2: Astoria. Astoria goes in to GF2 committed to the Shaper cause. At first, she develops some sympathy for the serviles that are being abused/neglected, and she begins to consider helping some of the (apparently) saner rebels. But certain events drive her fully back into Shaper arms and she takes a no-canister Shaper/Unaligned ending. Her myriad successes in GF2, plus later successes during her career eventually lead to her election to the Shaper Council. As the war drags on, she spends a lot of time thinking on what she saw during GF2. This convinces her that there must be sane rebels out there who would be willing to negotiate, which eventually leads to her situation in GF5. GF3: The eldest daughter of the GF1 protagonist. Needless to say, a canister junkie doesn't make for the greatest of mothers, and so the protagonist suffers some pretty serious abuse at the hands of the GF1 protagonist. Eventually, she gathers her younger sisters and runs away from home, hiding in a small village in Terrestria. Being the daughter of a person with "improved" genes, she shows a lot of potential, prompting her admittance to the school on the Ashen Islands. Her hatred and fear of her mother (and by proxy Shapers in general), plus the fact that she comes pre-addicted to the canisters makes her a perfect target for the rebels. She joins the rebels and becomes a canister junkie in the process, just like dear old mother. Not long after GF3, she vanishes. GF4: The middle child of the GF1 protagonist. A few years after GF3, her village is the site of a skirmish between the Rebels and Shapers. During the battle, the shed her younger sister is hiding in is struck by a stray firebolt fired by an Agent, and catches fire. The protagonist believes her sister killed. The rebels are defeated and the prisoners mercilessly executed, along with a fair number of villagers who are believed to be rebel sympathizers. The protagonist flees into the forest, and is picked up by the rebels. She joins the rebels, vowing to show more mercy than the Shapers, and be a better breed of Lifecrafter. I'm sure you can imagine how well that goes, though she does manage to avoid using canisters. She sticks with the Rebels through the end, though it costs her dearly. GF5: The youngest sister wasn't actually killed in the skirmish between GF3 and 4. She was saved by her eldest sister, who then takes her into the Drypeaks and experiments on her. The protagonist is forced to use canisters and a jury-rigged Geneforge put together using the damaged equipment from GF2. The GF3 protagonist is hoping to draw out the powers latent in the protagonist's genes as a side-effect of being the daughter of a canister-junkie. Thinks don't turn out quite as the GF3 protagonist expected, as I'm sure you can imagine. And so there you have it (needless to say, I put way to much thought into the things I do during my leisure time). I am curious about the backgrounds of other people's characters, so I'd be grateful if you posted them. I figure they might be fun to share, and they might give us all ideas for future playthroughs). acrussel
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